Ignoring the fact that the article speaks of a different game with the same name...
Even mentioning the name neverwinter should send chills down any RPG'ers spine.
Now you're just exaggerating.
the only thing that tentatively saved it (years later) were the mods players made,
Years? Try less than a year until the modders could make mods that were better than the main campaign. If you're speaking of the situation years later, we're talking about stuff that's completely mind-blowing. The mods were awesome. I was playing NWN for years without ever needing to complain about lack of good Linux games. Seriously, I don't really care much about the campaign, the mods were so much fun that I'd personally safely say that it's one of the best CRPGs ever. Far from getting chills down the spine, dammit.
The campaign just wasn't a selling point for NWN. From day one, I bought the game for the toolset and mods. I bought the expansion disks for tilesets and monsters.
Does this means i can use my simple USB stick instead of a memory card to keep my savegames on? (i have two xboxes, so i need portability)
What I would like to know if they'd support memory card readers. I can play music on Xbox 360 off USB drives, but not SD memory cards through an USB card reader... which is a little bit silly, because to my Linux box, the card reader just shows up as a yet another USB mass storage device. (I haven't tried the photo app on 360, which sounds like it could conceivably support card readers.)
Either MS just killed their memorycard business,
And good riddance to that! Console-specific memory cards suck, standard card formats rule! I cheered when I found out that Wii uses bog-ordinary SD cards. I cheered when I noted that Xbox 360 supports HDMI in addition to Yet Another Useless Proprietary RGB/Composite Port With Funny Cabling.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better.
<alittlebitofsarcasm>
Good, good, dear developers. Keep the "technological superiority" debate up. Never listen to the occasional grumble from the users who would, you know, be able to actually do something. Like watch videos online. Maybe tonight.
Don't worry! As a merry Firefox user, I'm sure I can find plenty of videos to watch in Wikimedia and, um, the Internet Archive for the most part. I'm sure you can soon come up with the standard that allows us to watch YouTube in all of its high-def glory without Flash.
</alittlebitofsarcasm>
Want to see a video clip of a place you're traveling on your phone? Not possible.
<moresarcasm>
Ah! To play videos on mobile phones. Truly, a fine application for H.264; a place where precision and fidelity are of utmost importance, a niche where Theora couldn't possibly compete. Verily! Wanderest thou now in the land of mobile phones, a veritable bastion of high-def videos, gigantic bitrates and Dolby-certified surround sound. Do not queue for content; queue for content to the extreme by literally queuing for the content. Mobile weather forecast: This winter will be colder than the last year, because hot air from marketing is meeting the cold reality even faster than before. The spring will still suck.
</moresarcasm>
*sigh* Sorry, I'm from Finland, we've already had more than enough time to get cynical about mobile applications. =)
Want to see videos from Wikipedia with your PS3/360? Not possible.
No, but since there's no web browser for 360, the point is moot if we're discussing HTML 5, is it not? And I've yet to figure out how to play H.264 videos on it. (I've heard it's supposed to play H.264, but it sure seems picky about the file format. It plays XviD videos fine, though.) And my Wii is barely able to play lowest-resolution FLVs from YouTube anyway, so meh.
The whole point was learning ELF structure and why things were they way they were. Didn't you ever wonder why a "hello world" program took over 4000 bytes on a modern computer, when in 1980 a Commodore VIC-20 managed to play games in less than 4K of available memory? This wasn't a waste of time.
Yeah.
To put this in perspective: Guess how big the executable header is in 8-bit Commodore machines?
2 bytes. The absolute start address of the program. The computer opens up the file, reads where it's stored, and starts putting data to the memory from that point onward. Simple enough. Of course, there's none of this "relocation" and "memory protection" rubbish to worry about.
If you wanted to store program in BASIC RAM, you could write a stub BASIC program that basically just has one code line, 10 SYS<startaddr>, where <startaddr> points to the address past the end of the program in BASIC RAM. In total, this "header" is just a dozen bytes or so in tokenised BASIC. (Don't have the time today to test how small I can make it, but...)
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Waaaah! Theo de Raadt wants his baby mulching machines to exchange information with JSON, but he can't do that, because evil is banned!
<flamebait type="merely sarcastic" expressedusing="XML" ref="Apple" hence="on topic">Plus, if evil is banned, why the hell is Apple using JSON? On the frigging iPhone????</flamebait> =)
What exactly are "good" and "evil" in this context, anyway? If it is such a big point that it warrants a mention in the license, why isn't it defined clearly?
many were worried over how marketing mediums such as Twitter — which has a 140-character limit on text — can sufficiently disclose drug risks."
Let's see...
"Buy Viagra (NB: It's a drug; engage brain)" 42 characters.
"Buy Viagra! It kills you in large doses." 40 characters.
"Buy Viagra! But only if you need it." 36 characters.
"Buy Viagra! Note: use with care." 32 characters.
"Buy Viagra - use as intended." 29 characters.
You were saying?
Plus, I'm sure people aren't using stand-alone twitter messages to actually sell the products. They probably include links to web pages, which don't have size limits. Worrying about Twitter size limits and ability to not include lengthy warnings is like that Teletype manager-type guy who picked capital letters instead of lower-case letters because you can't spell 'God' right with only lower-case letters. Societal norms are bound to collide with technology when the technical limitations are seen oh good heavens I need coffee I started rambling again.
Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.
Search? Search and content. We've had working search, but it has only been in the recent years when people started demanding some sort of reliability out of all of this stuff that's posted on web. And it was haphazard and not very well collected and people didn't try to work together. In short, we didn't have Wikipedia in 1995. Encyclopedia makers were busy figuring out this "CD-ROM" thing and wishing that Microsoft wouldn't ruin this market by providing Encarta to customers without charging an arm and leg (as if people would actually buy cheap products, the bastards). Your most reliable free source on all things Battle of Trafalgar? Uncle Armchairgeneralsson's Battle Page (in danger of being evicted from geocities.com due to not having enough animated GIFs). Other reliable sources? Probably behind a pay wall of some sort.
I'm waiting for hardware reliability issues to be solved; are they?
They are, or at least in present they're not likely. I haven't heard of any of my friends having RRoD issues with their consoles, and mine certainly has worked perfectly for this past year I've owned it.
and therefore know little about its available games, but I'm certain that at least a couple games revolve around socializing, much like Nintendo's Animal Crossing 3 for Wii.
I'd say that socialising is kind of a part of multiplayer landscape on 360; socialising happens in all games and genres. I can't think of games that are based purely on socialising. (However, there may be those, too, and there probably is. I've heard of *ahem* people subverting certain game types for social interaction.)
Does it count as fulfilling the obligations required by the GPL if you make your source code freely available and downloadable but your entire country is behind a firewall and no one can access it?:)
Isn't this kind of a modified version of one of the thought experiments from the Debian legal team? If you suppose dissidents in dictatorships should be allowed to improve and use the software without the need to put themselves in danger of exposing the fact that they have the software in their possession, then the licenses should only require sending source code and patches to people who specifically request them. (Incidentally, GPL doesn't require you to advertise your forked versions or send your modifications upstream. It just requires that if you distribute binaries, you should also make the source available upon request.)
Heck, the people who came up with this thought experiment probably never thought the same principle could be actually used by dictatorships to conceal the program from the outside world...
What's the difference between a photo editor and an image editor?
Image editor is an application designed for manipulation of 2D bitmap raster image data, usually using a set of very complex, powerful and effective functions such as drawing tools, filters, layering and channel operations.
Photo editor is a piece of shit sold to gullible customers, "allowing" them to "manage" and "archive" all of their "digital photos" and sometimes even perform a limited set of "operations" on them, making the whole process "fun".
So, the only real difference is the feature set, the primary activities you do with the programs, and the feature set. Hope this clear things up. =)
Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? What's the point in that?
Photoshop was made for the needs of the publishing industry, not specifically photographers. Photographers would want precision and fidelity at every turn, which would definitely limit the program's usefulness, but printers just care that photographs get printed to the paper in a way that it still looks good. In 1990, most of newspapers were black and white. Heck, in 2010, a lot of newspapers are still black and white - printing in one ink is cheaper than printing in four.
If you want to process photographs for black and white newspaper, all you need is the ability to touch up greyscale images - or, you can scan in colour photographs, and process individual components, as long as the end result is represented in greyscale. Going from greyscale to B/W, you get dithering on screen, and you want halftones on final printed page.
Obviously there's much use for graphics editing on B/W, even when the application is obviously not as capable as the current programs.
No, the makers of a painting program should not say "use window manager X or Y".
They're not really saying "use window manager X or Y". They were saying "use any window manager you want as long as it supports feature X or Y" - a far more reasonable request.
Having simple pieces that all take responsibility of their own area is the *nix way; if managing windows is hard, that's not the application's fault, it's the window manager's fault. Why fix one application when you can fix all of the applications at once?
Now they're saying "since so many of you refuse to use a window manager that works, we're doing a workaround..." and then add, "but you could - you know - save time by using the current version with a window manager that's not broken. Just saying."
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
A lot of people dissed the original combat system in ME1.
Ugh. In modern shooters, the most annoying problem is that AI allies run in your line of fire all the time. In Mass Effect 1, that happens a lot. In Mass Effect 2, that still happens a lot. But Mass Effect 1 made this far more annoying: While your squadmates run around every-frigging-where like headless chickens, don't worry, so do the enemies. Mass Effect 1 combat can turn into incredible jawdropping clusterfucks with everyone running all around the place and shooting in random directions. You can't make sense of that mess.
At first, when I played ME2, I thought "oh, damn, they've turned this into a Gears of War clone". Then I thought, "hey, Gears of War isn't a bad game at all, come to think of it." Enemies taking cover in firefight. You and squadmates doing the same. Frigging brilliant.
Yeah, I'm not 100% happy with some of the things they did (this thing they call a squad screen just isn't a proper character sheet any more, and what's up with ammo all of sudden), but if there was one thing that they fixed properly and fixed well and fixed for a good reason, it's combat.
They can use other names! If there's "iBook" and "PowerBook", maybe they could use, I don't know - PowerPad?...wait, that has been done before. Hmmmmmm... If there's "MacBooks", maybe "MacPad"? Wait, iPad isn't a Mac. *sigh* They're really dug their own grave now, haven't they?
Somehow BioWare is surviving, even if they're pushing DLC more obnoxiously than ever.
Bioware is going to push DLC? That would be an improvement. Boy, was I ever psyched up about Witch's Wake back in the day, and look what happened...
I don't really mind Bioware pushing DLC, I just hope they'd actually make DLCs. I mean, grand plans are nothing without actual releases. Two tiny DLCs for Mass Effect isn't exactly grand, is it now...
Then again, I've got a hunch that under EA's leadership, BioWare could go for the other extreme - quantity over quality - and mess it up completely that way. EA saw a problem with Origin when Ultima VII was over budget and schedule, and took drastic measures in use after that, and look how that turned out; I certainly hope the DLC laziness isn't Bioware's Achilles' heel...
Dunno. Let's look at Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and compare it with one of their latest, Bolt.
But Disney films don't exist in vacuums of their own. Disney can afford to fail. It doesn't matter to Disney whether Bolt was good or not; they figured out that if it's good, they get more money, if it's not, they still tons of money from their previous films so one film's failure is not a disaster. Whether a film succeeds or not depends on more than just the source material. Snow White was good because they made a damn good film; wherever they picked up the story is ultimately irrelevant.
The point is, when people bend common sense long enough, it stops working. Disney figured out a way to reverse this particular setup.
Yeah, it's nice that WordPress gets support for Twitter protocol.
So, would the Twitter clients please stop thinking that Twitter is the only site that speaks Twitter protocol?
I've been using identi.ca, and you can post on identi.ca using Twitter API. All you need to do is to change the base URL. And Twitter clients as a rule don't let you do that. People hard-code their clients to point to twitter.com. I've seen a lot of pointless forks of Twitter clients that differ from the base version only in that they specify another website to post to.
I'm not kidding. Hard coding. In 2009. In this "Web 2.0" environment which was supposed to be all about openness and interoperability.
I certainly hope that this will make the Twitter client makers to wake up and fix this glaring flaw in their software packages. Twitter API is no longer Twitter's own.
Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA.
I bought almost every DLC for Oblivion's Xbox360 version, even when Bethesda/2K didn't see a penny from the game purchase.
You see, I bought the game used.
Really grates you, doesn't it?
(And don't worry, Bethesda, I previously bought the PC version at full price. And the Game of the Year edition too. Just figured out I'd grab the 360 version because my PC isn't good enough to run the game at tolerable speed and the Wine support has always been a bit spotty. So yeah. =)
Of course, the company that invented the OGL has now abandoned it.
My gut feeling tells me the abandonment of OGL was Hasbro's doing, not WotC's. Hasbro is the type of company that isn't concerned about people actually using the products for anything at all, just that people shut up and pay for that stuff. (And yeah, I'm feeling a bit weird defending WotC, who itself believed in gutting money from people with their cardboard crack. =)
But yeah, I'm fairly certain that somewhere, somehow, there was a change in management and a new boss forgot to figure out all good things that the old boss had done right. And in GW's case, those who forget the history are doomed to repeat it.
These days, I usually assume that if a game gets released, it's at least not half bad. At least on console side, there's some quality control in place. If the game gets released with really, really, really damning flaws, I expect every reviewer to whine about it. Fortunately, here the reviewers are at least trying to keep up to some journalistic standard and aren't lying all the time.
I usually just read the reviews to see a few things: 1) did the game impress the reviewer whom I know is a fan of the genre and has seen many comparable examples? 2) just how much bullshit regarding the pre-release hype did the reviewer actually uncover, and would this affect my own expectations? Are the promised features that I was excited about still there? 3) Are there any big problems with the game that I should be aware of?
Score is ultimately an useless metric that depends on too many things. If our local prominent game mag gives the game 70 or up, it's usually a sign that the game is going to be at least somewhat fun and worth trying.
Not only that, but this supposedly "fucking with the interface" doesn't actually happen. In KDE4, you still close windows by single-clicking the small [x] up in the right corner of the window, you still open apps by clicking icons in a menu, you can still put files on your desktop. Yet, you have masses of assclown know-it-alls like the GP who will complain that everything is ruined, because, oh -- they never really say, they just whine, whine, whine.
Yep. The only thing that KDE folks screwed up was releasing a new version that wasn't as capable as the previous version, and was slow like molasses. That annoyed people. This, of course, also drew ire toward small problems, like the fact that UI had changed and things were in a different place.
So if GNOME folks decide to scrap this release and wait for a long time to get the stuff right, I'm all for it. I don't care if the UI is different, I just want to be able to do same things with about the same level of convenience, or easier. Not like "oh god I need to copy the music to the MP3 player with the file manager because Amarok no longer supports bog-ordinary FAT32 players". (And it still doesn't.)
I really hope that bluray is the last of this shiny plastic disc phenomenon.
Nope, there's nothing wrong with shiny plastic discs.
The media industry just needs to start treating them the way the tech industry wants them to be treated: dumb places to dump your dumb data on. Nothing more, nothing less.
If we want interactive rich media that people try to shovel on movie discs, we'll buy a video game instead. If we ever feel the need to willingly deal with this license and encryption bullshit, we will consult a psychiatrist next morning.
Let's go back to the basics and just use the discs to transport video in a commonly agreed format that a player device can play. That's all we ever really needed. If you don't want people to copy the film, put "plz don't copy k?" in the disc label.
Last I checked, DVD format doesn't mandate region coding, encryption or interactive content. I haven't checked Blu-Ray specs but I sure hope it doesn't either.
I've heard only silver bullets kill them. Hollow-point silver bullets.
Beware! Were-lawyer strikes again!!!
No no no no no, you're thinking of wrong creatures. Werewolves are feral beings, often unconcerned of the laws of human society.
Lawyers are vampires - well dressed gentlemen who want to drain your blood. You need hollow point stake rifles. And sun guns. And garlic gas grenades. And cruci-bombs.
Glad to be of help! And when you grab Doom3, be sure to check out The Dark Mod, which was just released and doesn't have too many maps yet. They will probably appreciate all the help they can get from competent mappers. (Not barely-qualified ever-noobs like me who made a few really horrible Q3 maps. It will be years before I'll make a good mission for this mod. They seem to have terrifyingly high standards. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring the fact that the article speaks of a different game with the same name...
Even mentioning the name neverwinter should send chills down any RPG'ers spine.
Now you're just exaggerating.
the only thing that tentatively saved it (years later) were the mods players made,
Years? Try less than a year until the modders could make mods that were better than the main campaign. If you're speaking of the situation years later, we're talking about stuff that's completely mind-blowing. The mods were awesome. I was playing NWN for years without ever needing to complain about lack of good Linux games. Seriously, I don't really care much about the campaign, the mods were so much fun that I'd personally safely say that it's one of the best CRPGs ever. Far from getting chills down the spine, dammit.
The campaign just wasn't a selling point for NWN. From day one, I bought the game for the toolset and mods. I bought the expansion disks for tilesets and monsters.
Does this means i can use my simple USB stick instead of a memory card to keep my savegames on? (i have two xboxes, so i need portability)
What I would like to know if they'd support memory card readers. I can play music on Xbox 360 off USB drives, but not SD memory cards through an USB card reader... which is a little bit silly, because to my Linux box, the card reader just shows up as a yet another USB mass storage device. (I haven't tried the photo app on 360, which sounds like it could conceivably support card readers.)
Either MS just killed their memorycard business,
And good riddance to that! Console-specific memory cards suck, standard card formats rule! I cheered when I found out that Wii uses bog-ordinary SD cards. I cheered when I noted that Xbox 360 supports HDMI in addition to Yet Another Useless Proprietary RGB/Composite Port With Funny Cabling.
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better.
<alittlebitofsarcasm>
Good, good, dear developers. Keep the "technological superiority" debate up. Never listen to the occasional grumble from the users who would, you know, be able to actually do something. Like watch videos online. Maybe tonight.
Don't worry! As a merry Firefox user, I'm sure I can find plenty of videos to watch in Wikimedia and, um, the Internet Archive for the most part. I'm sure you can soon come up with the standard that allows us to watch YouTube in all of its high-def glory without Flash.
</alittlebitofsarcasm>
Want to see a video clip of a place you're traveling on your phone? Not possible.
<moresarcasm>
Ah! To play videos on mobile phones. Truly, a fine application for H.264; a place where precision and fidelity are of utmost importance, a niche where Theora couldn't possibly compete. Verily! Wanderest thou now in the land of mobile phones, a veritable bastion of high-def videos, gigantic bitrates and Dolby-certified surround sound. Do not queue for content; queue for content to the extreme by literally queuing for the content. Mobile weather forecast: This winter will be colder than the last year, because hot air from marketing is meeting the cold reality even faster than before. The spring will still suck.
</moresarcasm>
*sigh* Sorry, I'm from Finland, we've already had more than enough time to get cynical about mobile applications. =)
Want to see videos from Wikipedia with your PS3/360? Not possible.
No, but since there's no web browser for 360, the point is moot if we're discussing HTML 5, is it not? And I've yet to figure out how to play H.264 videos on it. (I've heard it's supposed to play H.264, but it sure seems picky about the file format. It plays XviD videos fine, though.) And my Wii is barely able to play lowest-resolution FLVs from YouTube anyway, so meh.
The whole point was learning ELF structure and why things were they way they were. Didn't you ever wonder why a "hello world" program took over 4000 bytes on a modern computer, when in 1980 a Commodore VIC-20 managed to play games in less than 4K of available memory? This wasn't a waste of time.
Yeah.
To put this in perspective: Guess how big the executable header is in 8-bit Commodore machines?
2 bytes. The absolute start address of the program. The computer opens up the file, reads where it's stored, and starts putting data to the memory from that point onward. Simple enough. Of course, there's none of this "relocation" and "memory protection" rubbish to worry about.
If you wanted to store program in BASIC RAM, you could write a stub BASIC program that basically just has one code line, 10 SYS<startaddr>, where <startaddr> points to the address past the end of the program in BASIC RAM. In total, this "header" is just a dozen bytes or so in tokenised BASIC. (Don't have the time today to test how small I can make it, but...)
JSON is not propietary. http://www.json.org/license.html
Oh wow. I see a crisis brewing.
JSON license:
Open Source Definition:
Waaaah! Theo de Raadt wants his baby mulching machines to exchange information with JSON, but he can't do that, because evil is banned!
<flamebait type="merely sarcastic" expressedusing="XML" ref="Apple" hence="on topic">Plus, if evil is banned, why the hell is Apple using JSON? On the frigging iPhone????</flamebait> =)
What exactly are "good" and "evil" in this context, anyway? If it is such a big point that it warrants a mention in the license, why isn't it defined clearly?
Yup, proprietary.
many were worried over how marketing mediums such as Twitter — which has a 140-character limit on text — can sufficiently disclose drug risks."
Let's see...
You were saying?
Plus, I'm sure people aren't using stand-alone twitter messages to actually sell the products. They probably include links to web pages, which don't have size limits. Worrying about Twitter size limits and ability to not include lengthy warnings is like that Teletype manager-type guy who picked capital letters instead of lower-case letters because you can't spell 'God' right with only lower-case letters. Societal norms are bound to collide with technology when the technical limitations are seen oh good heavens I need coffee I started rambling again.
Heh. Lets cut and past "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" into the location bar of Chrome here...
and instantly...
"Battle of Trafalgar — Date: 21 October 1805 According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar"
Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.
Search? Search and content. We've had working search, but it has only been in the recent years when people started demanding some sort of reliability out of all of this stuff that's posted on web. And it was haphazard and not very well collected and people didn't try to work together. In short, we didn't have Wikipedia in 1995. Encyclopedia makers were busy figuring out this "CD-ROM" thing and wishing that Microsoft wouldn't ruin this market by providing Encarta to customers without charging an arm and leg (as if people would actually buy cheap products, the bastards). Your most reliable free source on all things Battle of Trafalgar? Uncle Armchairgeneralsson's Battle Page (in danger of being evicted from geocities.com due to not having enough animated GIFs). Other reliable sources? Probably behind a pay wall of some sort.
I'm waiting for hardware reliability issues to be solved; are they?
They are, or at least in present they're not likely. I haven't heard of any of my friends having RRoD issues with their consoles, and mine certainly has worked perfectly for this past year I've owned it.
and therefore know little about its available games, but I'm certain that at least a couple games revolve around socializing, much like Nintendo's Animal Crossing 3 for Wii.
I'd say that socialising is kind of a part of multiplayer landscape on 360; socialising happens in all games and genres. I can't think of games that are based purely on socialising. (However, there may be those, too, and there probably is. I've heard of *ahem* people subverting certain game types for social interaction.)
All of the sandboxy games where people can buy and decorate houses and run errands on behalf of various cute anthropomorphic animals that I can think of happen to be single-player, though. =)
Does it count as fulfilling the obligations required by the GPL if you make your source code freely available and downloadable but your entire country is behind a firewall and no one can access it? :)
Isn't this kind of a modified version of one of the thought experiments from the Debian legal team? If you suppose dissidents in dictatorships should be allowed to improve and use the software without the need to put themselves in danger of exposing the fact that they have the software in their possession, then the licenses should only require sending source code and patches to people who specifically request them. (Incidentally, GPL doesn't require you to advertise your forked versions or send your modifications upstream. It just requires that if you distribute binaries, you should also make the source available upon request.)
Heck, the people who came up with this thought experiment probably never thought the same principle could be actually used by dictatorships to conceal the program from the outside world...
What's the difference between a photo editor and an image editor?
Image editor is an application designed for manipulation of 2D bitmap raster image data, usually using a set of very complex, powerful and effective functions such as drawing tools, filters, layering and channel operations.
Photo editor is a piece of shit sold to gullible customers, "allowing" them to "manage" and "archive" all of their "digital photos" and sometimes even perform a limited set of "operations" on them, making the whole process "fun".
So, the only real difference is the feature set, the primary activities you do with the programs, and the feature set. Hope this clear things up. =)
Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? What's the point in that?
Photoshop was made for the needs of the publishing industry, not specifically photographers. Photographers would want precision and fidelity at every turn, which would definitely limit the program's usefulness, but printers just care that photographs get printed to the paper in a way that it still looks good. In 1990, most of newspapers were black and white. Heck, in 2010, a lot of newspapers are still black and white - printing in one ink is cheaper than printing in four.
If you want to process photographs for black and white newspaper, all you need is the ability to touch up greyscale images - or, you can scan in colour photographs, and process individual components, as long as the end result is represented in greyscale. Going from greyscale to B/W, you get dithering on screen, and you want halftones on final printed page.
Obviously there's much use for graphics editing on B/W, even when the application is obviously not as capable as the current programs.
No, the makers of a painting program should not say "use window manager X or Y".
They're not really saying "use window manager X or Y". They were saying "use any window manager you want as long as it supports feature X or Y" - a far more reasonable request.
Having simple pieces that all take responsibility of their own area is the *nix way; if managing windows is hard, that's not the application's fault, it's the window manager's fault. Why fix one application when you can fix all of the applications at once?
Now they're saying "since so many of you refuse to use a window manager that works, we're doing a workaround..." and then add, "but you could - you know - save time by using the current version with a window manager that's not broken. Just saying."
A lot of people dissed the original combat system in ME1.
Ugh. In modern shooters, the most annoying problem is that AI allies run in your line of fire all the time. In Mass Effect 1, that happens a lot. In Mass Effect 2, that still happens a lot. But Mass Effect 1 made this far more annoying: While your squadmates run around every-frigging-where like headless chickens, don't worry, so do the enemies. Mass Effect 1 combat can turn into incredible jawdropping clusterfucks with everyone running all around the place and shooting in random directions. You can't make sense of that mess.
At first, when I played ME2, I thought "oh, damn, they've turned this into a Gears of War clone". Then I thought, "hey, Gears of War isn't a bad game at all, come to think of it." Enemies taking cover in firefight. You and squadmates doing the same. Frigging brilliant.
Yeah, I'm not 100% happy with some of the things they did (this thing they call a squad screen just isn't a proper character sheet any more, and what's up with ammo all of sudden), but if there was one thing that they fixed properly and fixed well and fixed for a good reason, it's combat.
Houston, they've got trouble of some kind...
"That’s trouble of some kind." - Jack Moss, a random guy with a video camera
"Obviously, a major malfunction." - Steve Nesbitt, the NASA guy explaining what's going on
Proof that, sadly, immediately after a big disaster, the experts are often no more knowledgeable than random bystanders.
They can use other names! If there's "iBook" and "PowerBook", maybe they could use, I don't know - PowerPad? ...wait, that has been done before. Hmmmmmm... If there's "MacBooks", maybe "MacPad"? Wait, iPad isn't a Mac. *sigh* They're really dug their own grave now, haven't they?
Somehow BioWare is surviving, even if they're pushing DLC more obnoxiously than ever.
Bioware is going to push DLC? That would be an improvement. Boy, was I ever psyched up about Witch's Wake back in the day, and look what happened...
I don't really mind Bioware pushing DLC, I just hope they'd actually make DLCs. I mean, grand plans are nothing without actual releases. Two tiny DLCs for Mass Effect isn't exactly grand, is it now...
Then again, I've got a hunch that under EA's leadership, BioWare could go for the other extreme - quantity over quality - and mess it up completely that way. EA saw a problem with Origin when Ultima VII was over budget and schedule, and took drastic measures in use after that, and look how that turned out; I certainly hope the DLC laziness isn't Bioware's Achilles' heel...
Dunno. Let's look at Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and compare it with one of their latest, Bolt.
But Disney films don't exist in vacuums of their own. Disney can afford to fail. It doesn't matter to Disney whether Bolt was good or not; they figured out that if it's good, they get more money, if it's not, they still tons of money from their previous films so one film's failure is not a disaster. Whether a film succeeds or not depends on more than just the source material. Snow White was good because they made a damn good film; wherever they picked up the story is ultimately irrelevant.
The point is, when people bend common sense long enough, it stops working. Disney figured out a way to reverse this particular setup.
Yeah, it's nice that WordPress gets support for Twitter protocol.
So, would the Twitter clients please stop thinking that Twitter is the only site that speaks Twitter protocol?
I've been using identi.ca, and you can post on identi.ca using Twitter API. All you need to do is to change the base URL. And Twitter clients as a rule don't let you do that. People hard-code their clients to point to twitter.com. I've seen a lot of pointless forks of Twitter clients that differ from the base version only in that they specify another website to post to.
I'm not kidding. Hard coding. In 2009. In this "Web 2.0" environment which was supposed to be all about openness and interoperability.
I certainly hope that this will make the Twitter client makers to wake up and fix this glaring flaw in their software packages. Twitter API is no longer Twitter's own.
Some of the people buying this DLC are not people who bought the game in a new shrink-wrapped box. That could be seen as a dark cloud, a mass of gamers who play a game without contributing a penny to EA.
I bought almost every DLC for Oblivion's Xbox360 version, even when Bethesda/2K didn't see a penny from the game purchase.
You see, I bought the game used.
Really grates you, doesn't it?
(And don't worry, Bethesda, I previously bought the PC version at full price. And the Game of the Year edition too. Just figured out I'd grab the 360 version because my PC isn't good enough to run the game at tolerable speed and the Wine support has always been a bit spotty. So yeah. =)
Of course, the company that invented the OGL has now abandoned it.
My gut feeling tells me the abandonment of OGL was Hasbro's doing, not WotC's. Hasbro is the type of company that isn't concerned about people actually using the products for anything at all, just that people shut up and pay for that stuff. (And yeah, I'm feeling a bit weird defending WotC, who itself believed in gutting money from people with their cardboard crack. =)
But yeah, I'm fairly certain that somewhere, somehow, there was a change in management and a new boss forgot to figure out all good things that the old boss had done right. And in GW's case, those who forget the history are doomed to repeat it.
These days, I usually assume that if a game gets released, it's at least not half bad. At least on console side, there's some quality control in place. If the game gets released with really, really, really damning flaws, I expect every reviewer to whine about it. Fortunately, here the reviewers are at least trying to keep up to some journalistic standard and aren't lying all the time.
I usually just read the reviews to see a few things: 1) did the game impress the reviewer whom I know is a fan of the genre and has seen many comparable examples? 2) just how much bullshit regarding the pre-release hype did the reviewer actually uncover, and would this affect my own expectations? Are the promised features that I was excited about still there? 3) Are there any big problems with the game that I should be aware of?
Score is ultimately an useless metric that depends on too many things. If our local prominent game mag gives the game 70 or up, it's usually a sign that the game is going to be at least somewhat fun and worth trying.
Not only that, but this supposedly "fucking with the interface" doesn't actually happen. In KDE4, you still close windows by single-clicking the small [x] up in the right corner of the window, you still open apps by clicking icons in a menu, you can still put files on your desktop. Yet, you have masses of assclown know-it-alls like the GP who will complain that everything is ruined, because, oh -- they never really say, they just whine, whine, whine.
Yep. The only thing that KDE folks screwed up was releasing a new version that wasn't as capable as the previous version, and was slow like molasses. That annoyed people. This, of course, also drew ire toward small problems, like the fact that UI had changed and things were in a different place.
So if GNOME folks decide to scrap this release and wait for a long time to get the stuff right, I'm all for it. I don't care if the UI is different, I just want to be able to do same things with about the same level of convenience, or easier. Not like "oh god I need to copy the music to the MP3 player with the file manager because Amarok no longer supports bog-ordinary FAT32 players". (And it still doesn't.)
I really hope that bluray is the last of this shiny plastic disc phenomenon.
Nope, there's nothing wrong with shiny plastic discs.
The media industry just needs to start treating them the way the tech industry wants them to be treated: dumb places to dump your dumb data on. Nothing more, nothing less.
If we want interactive rich media that people try to shovel on movie discs, we'll buy a video game instead. If we ever feel the need to willingly deal with this license and encryption bullshit, we will consult a psychiatrist next morning.
Let's go back to the basics and just use the discs to transport video in a commonly agreed format that a player device can play. That's all we ever really needed. If you don't want people to copy the film, put "plz don't copy k?" in the disc label.
Last I checked, DVD format doesn't mandate region coding, encryption or interactive content. I haven't checked Blu-Ray specs but I sure hope it doesn't either.
I've heard only silver bullets kill them. Hollow-point silver bullets.
Beware! Were-lawyer strikes again!!!
No no no no no, you're thinking of wrong creatures. Werewolves are feral beings, often unconcerned of the laws of human society.
Lawyers are vampires - well dressed gentlemen who want to drain your blood. You need hollow point stake rifles. And sun guns. And garlic gas grenades. And cruci-bombs.
Glad to be of help! And when you grab Doom3, be sure to check out The Dark Mod, which was just released and doesn't have too many maps yet. They will probably appreciate all the help they can get from competent mappers. (Not barely-qualified ever-noobs like me who made a few really horrible Q3 maps. It will be years before I'll make a good mission for this mod. They seem to have terrifyingly high standards. =)